Tips and tricks to become a great online poker player

24 February 2017

There are many different kinds of online poker. The vast majority of people who play or have played online poker have played the variant known as No Limit Texas Hold’em. No Limit Hold’em is one of the most complex games ever invented. While it’s not possible to even begin a comprehensive lesson on how to become good at this game within the span of a short article, we can still take a 5,000-foot view and point you in the right direction.

It’s all about exploitation

The online poker economy is, perhaps, the closest thing to pure, unfettered capitalism that’s ever been devised. And capitalism, in its purest form, is all about exploitation. In No Limit Hold’em, nearly all of your profits will come from exploiting the mistakes of your opponents while not allowing them to similarly exploit yours. The difference between a Heads Up No Limit player with a win rate of 40bb/100 and one with a win rate of 5bb/100 is that the former is really good at exploiting his opponents’ errors.

Choose a baseline strategy, adjust from there

In poker, the best practical way to exploit your opponent’s bad tendencies is to know when he is deviating from a good baseline strategy. Unfortunately, choosing a good baseline strategy is an extremely complex problem, as there are infinite baseline strategies and the best ones are what are known as game theory optimal strategies. The top computer scientists in the world have great difficulty deriving these. Luckily, there is another baseline strategy that is arguably just as good as a game theory optimal one. That is the general opponent population’s collective strategy, or just the population for short.

Using tracking software, it’s possible to know what the population of opponents does at every decision point. This is essentially equivalent to treating every player we’ve ever played or ever will play as one solitary opponent. Now that we know what the population does, how many combos it has, what its range is likely to be and how large its bet sizes are at every possible point in the game, we will also know when a given opponent is deviating from the baseline strategy. This is where we can begin to exploit our opponent’s bad tendencies.

For example, if we know that the population, on average, bets the flop 60% of the time and we are facing an opponent who has bet the flop 90% of the time, it is clear that this opponent is betting the flop far too often. The appropriate response varies according to what our opponent is likely to do on future streets but will likely involve check raising and calling much more frequently than normal.

If all this seems to complex, just remember this. Treat the general population of opponents as one opponent. That’s your baseline strategy. Formulate your default strategy to play optimally versus that baseline strategy derived from the population of opponents. Now, if the particular opponent you’re playing is severely deviating from the baseline strategy, then he’s making big mistakes. Figure out the best way to maximize your expected return versus those mistakes.

If this seems overly technical, reread it and use Google until you understand it. This is the backbone of every winning poker strategy and, once you understand it, you will be on the road to becoming a world-class player. More information can be gathered here: poker online android.